To achieve political and policy victories, an understanding of communication is necessary, as the communication failures of the Obama administration have made clear. And the environmental movement as a whole shares such failures.

The best political messaging requires an excellent communications system, or it won't be heard. Progressives have the money to build this, but do they understand the desperate need for such a system, and whether they have the will to build it?

In one experiment, the strength of blink reflexes to unexpected noises was measured and correlated with degrees of reactions to external threats. Conservatives reacted considerably more strongly than liberals.